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Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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July 30, 2014

Still life with Mounir's ceramic donkey, wedgewood pot, and Turkish tiles.

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

I find myself thinking a lot about what to paint or draw these days. With Gaza and our chaotic world so much on my mind, it's hard to focus on simple beauty: it somehow seems trivial, oblivious to reality, self-indulgent. And yet simple beauty and simple pleasure are what nearly every human being desires, and deserves.

The little ceramic donkey in this drawing belonged to my father-in-law, so it's precious to us. I think it came from his native Syria, though I'm not sure; to him it was a reminder of the donkeys that used to bring fresh cool water from the mountains into Damascus. In the later years of his life, he had a whole menagerie of small animal figures: birds, monkeys, camels, an elephant, snakes: a veritable Noah's ark. None of them were to scale, which gave the arrangement an even quirkier air. When he still lived in a house, they were arranged around, and in, a large houseplant. After he moved to a retirement home, they were on a wooden stand, and he sometimes liked to rearrange them for his own amusement. His favorite was a tiny mouse made of ivory. One day it disappeared and he was disconsolate. We searched everywhere but never found it. He blamed the housekeeper, saying she must have knocked it onto the floor and vacuumed it up. After he died I hoped it would turn up as the apartment was emptied, but it never did: I like to think it scampered away to live behind the bookshelves, exactly as long as he did.

Last night I began reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun ("Bab al-Shams"). It's been on our shelf ever since we heard Khoury read at the Blue Met literary festival in Montreal some years ago, when he was interviewed and spoke about his close friend Mahmoud Darwish. Afterward we went up and met him, and he inscribed this copy to J., whose grandmother's maiden name was also Khoury. The novel is a story of relationships that contain Palestinian and personal histories; it is woven together rather clumsily - as the NYT reviewer notes - from snatches of stories, but this was a deliberate device by the author, who tried to write in a way that mirrors Palestinian reality: the history of the nation and each person seeming torn and patched together.

The novel is written in the voice of a surrogate son sitting at the bedside of his "father," an elderly freedom fighter who has had a stroke and lies in a coma. The son, a medic in a hospital in a refugee camp, spends most of his days bathing and caring for the dying man, refusing to believe he won't regain consciousness, and then at night, like Scheherazade, tells him stories, hoping that the words are still penetrating. I've been afraid of reading it, and now, even though I've started, I still am.

In addition to the tragic and horrifying events it recalls, the book of course also reminds me of my own dialogue with my very alert, very aged father-in-law, and of the last few months when he slipped in and out of present time and space as we sat by his bed, talking to him and listening to his own stories. When he died, at 99, a door into our family's life and history closed forever; now we too must patch it together out of fragments. Last night, when the narrator began reciting bits of verse by al-Mutanabi, perhaps the greatest of all classical Arab poets, I felt myself back in the familiar room with its blue and yellow silk carpet, the books lining the walls, the statue of Socrates on the stand in front of the old shortwave radio, and my father-in-law, leaning back in his chair, eyes shut, smiling at the ceiling as he recited poetry.

Terrible times can paralyze us, or we can use them, turning their negative energy into something better. Perhaps the time has finally come for me to pull out those dialogues that were collected here under the title The Fig and the Orchid, and see what can be done with them. As sad as my father-in-law -- a former UN administrator of a refugee camp in Gaza, among his many positions through a long life of teaching and ministry -- would be over the events today, he always believed in the power of education, beauty, literature, noble ideals, and -- most especially -- reason and truth. He often spoke about their remarkable ability to endure across the millenia, lifting people above the worst.

"The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men. The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

--al-Mutanabi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabi, I have just learned, was the son of a humble water-carrier.

January 20, 2011

In the dream, my father-in-law climbs out of his bed and disappears. All night, the three of us search for him - his dead wife, my husband, and me. At dawn we see him climbing over the porch railing, wearing an old grey sweatshirt, and a red bandana tied around his forehead. He enters the house without a word and goes to his room.When the morning paper comes, there's an article that says he was seen among the homeless people in a rough part of town, preaching or teaching or talking, they're not sure.

November 22, 2010

Looking for bouillabaise recipes, I pulled out my worn copy of Julia Child the other day, and in the fish soup section found a folded page clipped from the New York Times. It was this: a Molly O'Neill food column from the Sunday magazine section, showing a "winter chowder" of mussels, sea bass, and small red potatoes. At the bottom, there was a note in my mother's handwriting, written with the same red ballpoint she often used for the Sunday crossword: "You can get all these ingredients, so try! Sounds delicious." Of course, she didn't need to add the inflection or additional words, but I heard them quite clearly on this second reading, as well as the first: "You can get all these ingredients (but I can't, and your father probably would turn his nose up anyway), so please try it and tell me how it is."

I looked for the date on the clipping, and saw it was part of the heading: the 24th of December, 2000. Christmas Eve in the first year of the century, the day before the calendar took its fateful turn into 2001, when all our lives would be changed. And I sat back, with the thin smooth paper in my hand, and tried to remember what life felt like back then, a decade ago: before 9/11; before I wrote a book about homosexuality and the church; before Afghanistan or the Iraq War; before Homeland Security; before my mother-in-law, or my mother, or my father-in-law became ill and died; before I started this blog; before I got to know any of my Muslim friends; before I got to know any of you; before menopause; before I ever started to feel old; before we even considered moving to Montreal; before I found out I could deal with a whole lot of things I'd never anticipated. It felt like half my life ago, and I was so stunned by the enormity of what that decade had held that I simply sat there for an unknown amount of time, unable to move, with the paper in my hand that had been sent, I felt, to an entirely different woman, while the world continued to pass by in front of the windows.

But then, today, I decided to dig into my archives and see what I could find about her -- that woman, that other self who seemed so far away. She's always left traces, and I wasn't disappointed: I found a letter written to an older British friend-of-the-family (and fellow gardener) three days before the date of the clipping. (Of course, it was printed out and sent in an airmail envelope.) (The political context becomes clear in the letter, but here's a little more personal background: J., his brother, and his father had traveled to Damascus, Syria that spring but he and I had cancelled a planned trip back there together because of unrest due to the Palestinian Intifada. As it turned out, we never went, and haven't been back to England since then, either, because of family and work concerns, and then the complexities of moving to a new country. A decade later, though, life is changing once again, and we have plans for travel in the future.)

------------------

December 21, 2000

Dear John,

The sun is just ducking behind the hills at about 3:15 pm on the shortest day of the year. I imagine it has gone down already in England, and despite my memory of those short hours of daylight I’m finding myself quite nostalgic for your country this season. The election debacle has drained all of us; everyone is a little more out of sorts than usual, if not because of the holidays, then in anticipation of the rancor that will emanate from Washington in 2001 and 2002. Nothing to be done but drink an extra glass of wine and escape into some music and a good book! However, your invitation to visit a chad-free though soggy England is pretty compelling! All we can offer in return is a worry-free roast of beef with the family clan on Christmas Day!

J. and I made a quick trip to Montreal last week to buy “provisions” for the Christmas season. Montreal has not only marvelous French bakeries and European groceries (not to mention restaurants), but a large and varied ethnic population including many Middle Easterners. We’ve discovered a Persian market filled with exotic spices and the largest pistachios I’ve ever seen; a family-owned Syrian grocery with everything from tiny dried okra strung on twine (this is the best, my in-laws assure me – do the British even eat okra? We northerners think of it as a “southern” food and therefore suspect) to beeswax-colored olive oil soap from Aleppo, and Moroccan sardines. Then there is a huge Arabic “super-marché” where you can buy freshly-baked flatbread (we bring it home and freeze it), coffee, olives of every variety, grains and legumes, pastries, pumpkin seeds for Mounir to sit and crack to his heart’s content. We have gotten to like Montreal very much. It is only 3 – 3 ½ hours from us by car, an hour more than Boston, and feels like a world away.

It was a pleasure to be out of the country, actually, if only for a couple of days, and read something else in the papers! We woke there last Tuesday to a blizzard, the first of the season, and a foot of snow on the ground. The hardy Canadians don’t seem to miss a beat; they were all up and about digging out their cars and tramping through the drifts, and J. and I quickly joined them. Montreal is a funny mixture of French culture, ethnicity, and a sense that the New World wilderness of Eskimos and polar bears is just out of sight – which it practically is. One finds excellent baguettes next to shops selling Inuit soapstone carvings and fur slippers; the legacy of the Canadian fur trade is still very much in evidence. J. said it was great to be in a place where people take snow in stride and don’t even complain about it: here we are increasingly infiltrated by “flatlanders” from the dreaded plains of Massachusetts, Connecticut and –horrors—New Jersey. People like my dear husband, born with skis on his feet, have a hard time dealing with those who can’t drive in the snow and are overjoyed by the first robins. No, we are not moving to Glacier Bay anytime soon – but it is nice to have some snow for Christmas.

Everyone here is fine. My mother-in-law seems to have recovered her health and spirits, which is a blessing for all of us. She is definitely more fragile, physically slower and more unsteady, but her current state is a huge improvement over what felt like a downward spiral for most of last year. Mounir continues to amaze all of us with his vigor, humor, and enormous appetite. He has followed the election blow-by-blow and is dismayed; in fact he took to his bed for two days after Bush was finally declared the winner because he was so depressed by the partisan and political Supreme Court; he seemed to take it as a personal affront. Maybe I told you that he has been writing to Clinton regularly for the last year or so; each letter is a small essay composed over a week or two. This has been his main intellectual occupation. As the Clinton presidency winds down, Mounir has turned to art instead. For the last month he has been obsessed with the construction of a multi-page collage that’s a sort of summation and commentary upon Clinton’s finest and worst moments. I think it’s extremely clever and amusing – even though I think he takes scissors to the library and secretly clips their current periodicals. We took them both with us to my parents in central New York State for Thanksgiving and it was good for them to have a change of scene. J. and I stand back in amazement, watching these two entirely different sets of parents not only getting along but seeming to like each other. Maybe they are all play-acting for our sakes, but it seems genuine.

This was a difficult gardening year but, it sounds, not nearly as challenging as yours. We had a very cold spring and early summer. Vegetable seeds came up but the plants just stayed small until the weather suddenly turned scorching hot in July. Everything shot up, flowered, bore fruit all at once, and then the plants expired, exhausted. We had a lot of tomatoes, for example, but all at once whereas usually they start bearing in mid - late July and continue until frost at the end of September. There was fairly even moisture all season, and the perennials did well except for being pretty much spent by mid-August. It was not a good year for roses, but they are always chancy here, and prey to infestations of aphids and Japanese beetles. What a hobby! I should have my head examined.

Music has been a little more satisfying. Our choir has been preparing and performing for the Christmas season; we did our annual Lessons and Carols service the evening of Advent III and will be singing special music at the midnight service on Christmas Eve. I’m continuing to take voice lessons and my singing slowly improves; it’s not a terrific instrument, I’m afraid, but I do enjoy it so much and am lucky to have an excellent teacher. It’s good therapy, and I’m happy to support her opera career…I gave up my piano lessons after being elected to the vestry at church last January, and without the dread of facing my formidable teacher every two weeks I find I don’t play nearly as much, and certainly don’t polish anything. Are you playing that wonderful new piano?

I’m not sure being on vestry is a fair trade at all – have you ever done it? I am learning a lot about my fellows but I can’t say I’m enjoying it – and there are two more years to go. We are having a lot of trouble with our Rector, which is painful and difficult politically within the congregation; and at the same time plans are proceeding for a major building project and capital campaign. Aargh!

J. is much more sensible; he goes skiing! It’s been a good year on the slopes so far and he looks fit and tan. We celebrated his 50th birthday in September with a party of old friends and family that was a feast and very happy occasion for all of us. He didn’t seem to mind the half-century mark a bit, and why should he, he never seems to age in spirit and grows more handsome every year.

Since the Middle East continues to feel off-limits for American tourists, we are planning to come to England this spring, probably in late April or early May. If we can, we hope to stay a little longer than two weeks this time, and we certainly hope to come to Sussex and visit you there if it’s convenient for you. Please let us know what your travel plans are, if any, and we promise to keep you posted as ours develop. We send our very best wishes for a Happy Christmas, and for the New Year – in which we hope to see you either here or there, or both!

May 09, 2010

10:00 am, and the bells are ringing at Immaculée Conception. Joggers go by with their golden retrievers, the old neighborhood women with their fluffy little dogs. Everything seems normal for a Sunday morning in May except for the snow that calmly falls, turning the window and my unbelieving mind into a blank television screen of fifty years ago.

Last night we watched a video about the frozen seas of the arctic and antarctic. Thousands of penguins riding waves that fling them onto the cliffs where they'll lay their eggs. The curved white backs of beluga trapped between ice-floes, rising to breathe in a small hole and diving again, as rhythmic as the turning gears of a giant clock, their backs scarred from the claws of hungry polar bears who wait at the edges of the hole. The underwater dance of fur seals feeding on a mass of pink, transparent krill. The bloodied muzzle of an arctic fox as she tears at the remains of a beluga carcass left by the bear.

I've moved north, and it's snowing in May.

Last night I dreamt of water, too. I was at the lake with my mother, and after talking to her inside the house I went out along the shore. It was the way it used to be, the water full of frogs and minnows that scattered and splashed at my approach, reeds and aquatic plants growing undisturbed. A frog with moth-wings attached to its back crawled out of the water, and I stooped for a closer look, finding myself on a pebbly shore beneath an eye-level, rocky wall where I tried to get a hand-hold, all the while looking at the plants growing in the crevices. I looked down at my feet; my leather hiking boots filled with water, but it wasn't cold, and suddenly I didn't care and let myself fall backwards into the shallow water, laughing, my jeans and white shirt soaking wet. Then I was walking back up the hill to the house to tell my mother to come down and see, but it wasn't her I found inside, but my father-in-law, lying on his bed under a blue sheet. He suddenly leapt out of bed, as nimble as a young boy, and quickly hopped back in again, a sly smile on his face as if to say, "You didn't see me do that!"

This morning I watch the snow falling and think of them, but mostly I see the moth-wings, patterned like old brown calico with a light blue eye, walking along the shore on the back of a frog, and a thin green stalk rising out of the water, bearing a flower like a white rose, that my mother needed to see.

February 04, 2010

(Tuesday) Awake early, I meditate a little but mostly sit here on the couch in the half-light, thinking. J. spent a restless night; we're both concerned about a friend who just received a distressing diagnosis.This friend is strong, surrounded by caring friends; we'll all do whatever we can. And yet the emptiness opens out, ahead of her, ahead of me, and I realize once again how alone each of us is.

This room contains remainders of so many lives: my mother's desk, my grandfather's sleigh bells, the tambourine inlaid with camel bone that my father-in-law bought in Cairo, a plate my mother-in-law bought on Rhodes, flute music I practiced in high school. Remainders after relinquishment of so much else: these are the things we felt we had to keep. And what of this is necessary, really? Not much, even the wall of books behind me or the stack of CDs, most of which exist now inside this machine on which I'm typing. Sentiment and familiarity, and a need for beauty, but even these could go, will go someday, along with us. Meanwhile, on the mantle there's an Italian handpainted jug that was my mother's; I know she bought it when she was young and always liked it, and after she died I brought it back here because it reminded me of the exuberance and delight she had inside but often kept hidden. On the other side is a little ceramic donkey that was my father-in-law's; he's carrying four water-jugs on his back, a memory in miniature of the Damascus water-sellers of his own youth.

On the floor there's also a baby's car seat. In a few days, at midnight, we'll be driving to the airport to pick up two friends who are coming back from China with their newly-adopted eight-month-old daughter. I think of the life stretching ahead of her, eighty or ninety or a hundred years into the future, and the lives stretching behind me, back to my father-in-law's Damascus of 1918, and the hill farm where my grandmother was born in 1900. It's like stretching my arms out in both directions, as far as they'll reach, with me in the middle. And after I'm gone, someone will look at a painting of mine or even one of these objects, which they'll probably remember as ours rather than someone else's, and it will form one of those distant edges rather than the center. Because we remember stories, don't we? No matter how much history we read or how far technology can take us into the future, we place ourselves in time - at least I suspect we do - the way people always have, through remembered snips of things we were told, illustrated by photographs, that have become our own personal myth. It's far, the distance between us and this baby! We're certainly old enough to be her grandparents. And today we'll become a small part of her own myth, to be retold when she is an old woman, somewhere near the year 2100: "It was a day in February when I arrived in Canada in the middle of the night, and friends I remember from my childhood picked us up at the airport..."

It used to distress me to think this way, about how we're here for a little spell and then replaced by the young. Growing up in an agrarian and fairly static society, where the generations overlapped widely, possessions accumulated, and memories seemed long, I also didn't see immigration, relinquishment, dislocation and change as a potential overlay on the progress of time to which everyone is subject. Funny, though, how as I've gotten older these notions have become normal, even comforting, to the point where I can view my own life as a tableau on a mantelpiece, pleasing enough for a while -- and then a hand reaches out, the jug is exchanged for a glass vase or a candlestick, a bird flies in and settles down, and the donkey just walks off and disappears.

August 25, 2009

Yesterday we had to go to the northeastern part of the city, near Anjou to pick up a package, and on the way back we decided to stop at Sami's, a well-known Montreal wholesaler of fruits and vegetables. Sami's is an Arab company, with one large warehouse-like store at the Jean-Talon and another major warehouse in the Chabanel district near Marche Central. But when we walked into this east-end store, we couldn't believe our eyes. The photographs don't begin to convey the vastness of the warehouse, or just how much produce was on display in these towering piles. We had almost no money, and Sami's only does cash transactions, so we pooled all our coins and finally found a cash machine so that we could take advantage of the stop. Extra-virgin olive oil for 4.99...vine-ripe tomatoes for 99 cents a pound...yellow peppers for 1.35...

Sami's also carries all the roots and herbs needed in the cooking of the African and Latin American communities, as well as Middle Eastern ones. I love seeing the stacks of fresh mint, piles of parsley and dill, thyme tied into great bunches. Yesterday, though, I was stopped by this display of leaves and their name in Arabic: "malukhiyah" - these are the Egyptian mallow leaves that are the basis for special dishes loved by Egyptians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and it is this leaf that my father-in-law was always asking for, but I never found. We brought him a frozen package once, but he, of course, dismissed it as inauthentic. If he were alive now, I'd bring him fresh green almonds and malukhiyah, try to follow his directions for cooking the herb with chicken, and endure the insults when he tasted it. Instead, all I could do was to picked up a sheaf of leaves, crushed one and hold it to my nose, and then gently put it back onto the pile like an offering.

Yesterday I began writing about him again; it's time to pick up the pieces of that story and fill in the blank areas: he'd be 100 years and two months right now. I see him clearly in my imagination, eating malukhiyah and gazing out at the Mediterranean, lost in contented thought.

(Does anyone here know how to cook malukhiyah, or have memories of eating it? I'd love to hear from you if you do.)

July 13, 2009

It started today with my father-in-law's groaning ascent of the stairs as I made the morning coffee. I even turned around to watch him climb up, smiling, making exaggerated sounds with each raising of a knee. My mother-in-law sat in the living room, content to be waited on for once; my mother was already in the kitchen, thirty years cleaving away like the soft block of mozzarella under my knife; maybe we were making the wedding cake, that other night in a long-ago late July.

Funny, how the poignancy of leaving hasn't really hit me, except in these shadowy presences that somehow decided to make themselves known today. I pour the coffee, gaze out the window at last things: the reddening apples, the tall white shafts of hosta blossoms, the budding hydrangeas that won't fully blossom until we're gone, the tight green blackberries, the white-throated sparrow anxiously guarding her nest... and everywhere I go in the yard, the catbird precedes me, flicking his tail in the low shrubs.

In the afternoon I had to do an errand, and found myself on the street we always took to see my father-in-law. On a sudden impulse, I turned in, and drove slowly up to the entrance, around the back, and looked up at the balcony of his old apartment. Someone had planted the windowboxes with dark purpley-red petunias, which were thriving under their vigorous care; there were no pots and clutter, no chairs set out in the afternoon sun, just the flowers, and my quick tears, unable to water anything but my cheeks.

At the yarn shop at the bottom of the hill, women like me parking their cars, shooting me a quick glance, a knowing smile: you knit too. Yes, but I'm leaving, don't you see? I may never come here again, and then the shop-owner's blind golden retriever is pressing against my leg like the ghost of my old dog, from the first years here, before I'd even met J.

Back at home, I park the car, go inside, and sit down on the sofa-bed, the only piece of furniture remaining in the living room. "It will be all right, honey," my mother says, and I close my eyes and sink back into the blue velveteen cushions, wondering if I'm just exhausted or if these people are really coming by to say their farewells to the house and tell me it's OK. After a bit I get up, look out the window, and see a woman from the neighborhood stop at our free pile. She's young herself, with a little girl running beside the carriage that holds twin boys, and there's another in her belly. They're all blonde, these four, and they walk by every day, with their shy smiles and slow manner; this is her life, tending these children that keep coming amid a poverty she tries to hide. There's nothing out there for kids today, I realize, and so I go off into the garage and quickly skim through the boxes of books for a few children's titles: the worn Mother Goose my mother read to me when I was the age of that little girl; a large-print version of Pinnochio. They've left our yard, but it's easy to catch up to them, and I call out "hello" so as not to startle this mother who seems to walk so meditatively, or perhaps it's just a kind of stupor, I can't tell. She turns around and says hello, and I tell her I'm the one who's moving, would she like a few children's books? And she says sure with a shy laugh, thank you very much, we've been taking your stuff, and stows the books in the stroller along with a whole pile of others - she's been at the village library. "Enjoy them, they were mine when I was her age," I say, and turn around and head back to the safety of my own lawn, my own porch, for a few more days.

I studied Arabic and Near Eastern Studies with your father in 197x, and I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting with our small class in his home at the school. As class began, he insisted we have tastes of exotic delicacies he offered us on a tray. When we protested we were not hungry (this was an evening class, after dinner) he rejoined, in his musical singsong voice with a twinkle in his eye, "One does not eat because one is hungry, one eats because food is offered." We dutifully partook of a morsel or two before delving into the dramatic history of this distant part of the world none of us had ever seen.

Thanks to your father, the Middle East began that year to open up in color and joy. Ever since it has seemed to me both human and accessible, even as the world news would have us believe it different and dangerous. I have never forgotten the warm way it was introduced to me.

My deepest sympathies and gratitude to all your family."

(New readers who aren't familiar with the stories of my father-in-law posted here over the past few years will find them collected, in reverse chronological order, under the title "The Fig and the Orchid.")

September 10, 2008

I'd intended to write something entirely different tonight, but when I came across this poem of Cesare Pavese, who was born September 9, 1908, I had to reproduce it here. You can read this and other poems of Pavese, translated by Linh Dinh, here, or follow other links via wood s lot, where I found this one.

Of course, it reminds me of the death of my father-in-law. Today we went to the Arab supermarket where we often shopped for things to take down to him in New Hampshire. I hadn't been thinking about him too much until I saw the bins of fresh dates, yellow and brown, still attached to their stems.

This is what stops: the body that sees, that tastes, complains, appreciates. The material world of associations goes on, but irrevocably altered from the natural impulses: pluck the fruit; cook the succulent meat; prepare the soup in the favorite bowl. Now our task is to go on plucking, cooking, preparing, but for ourselves, with absence seated across the table. Only in my own middle age have I understood that the dead had their own associations, mostly unspoken and unknown to me, their student, and that in my own life I am creating, unwittingly, associations that will stop someone else, someday, in the market or the street, stung for a moment by the grief and joy of having loved me.

End of Fantasy
by Cesare Pavese

This body won't start again. Touching his eye sockets
one feels a heap of earth is more alive,
that the earth, even at dawn, does not keep itself so quiet.
But a corpse is the remains of too many awakenings.

We only have this power: to start
each day of life—before the earth,
under a silent sky—waiting for an awakening.
One is amazed by so much drudgery at dawn;
through awakening within awakening a job is done.
But we live only to shudder
at the labor ahead and to awaken the earth one time.
It happens at times. Then it quiets down along with us.

If touching that face the hand would not shake—
if the live hand would feel alive touching it—
if it's true that that cold is only the cold
of the earth, frozen at dawn,
perhaps it'd be an awakening, and things that keep quiet
under the dawn, would speak up again. But my hand
trembles, and of all things resembles a hand
that doesn't move.

At other times waking up at dawn
was a dry pain, a tear of light,
even a deliverance. The stingy word
of the earth was cheerful, for a brief moment,
and to die was to go back there again. Now, the waiting body
is what remains of too many awakenings and doesn't return to the earth.
They don’t even say it, the hardened lips.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my
father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid";
please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the
whole series.)

August 24, 2008

Okuribito (Departures), directed by Yojiro Takita, follows an out-of-work Japanese cellist who leaves Tokyo, goes back to his hometown, and becomes a undertaker. The term means something rather different than it does in the west: in Japan, the specialty our cellist learns is "en-coffinment" - the preparation of the body of the deceased and placement into the coffin prior to cremation. This is performed in an elaborate, slow ritual in front of the family, and involves washing the body (while concealing any nudity from the family), dressing it, and making the deceased as beautiful and natural as possible -- with utmost respect, and affection. People who have never witnessed the ritual seem to think of it, and the profession, as macabre, even creepy, but if the film is accurate, when performed by an artist, it is moving, beautiful and cathartic, helping to release both the spirit of the deceased, and the spirits of those left behind.

The film is also extremely funny at times, in fact its balance between humor and wrenching emotion was absolutely sure-footed. I felt that rare sense of bonding within the audience itself: we laughed together, but also cried: when was the last time you heard audible sobs from a dark movie theater? Considering what J. and I have been through recently, it was emotional for me too: I think some of the catharsis portrayed in the film was transmitted to the audience. It was astonishing for me to discover that Japanese culture includes this elaborate ritual -- not always done well, however -- for the preparation of the body of the dead, formerly done by the family but now entrusted to a profession, that goes beyond religion into the culture itself, and ultimately beyond culture to touch our most basic, universal issues as social beings painfully aware of our mortality and the finiteness of human relationships.

I haven't written yet about the death of my father-in-law and what happened afterwards, but I probably will eventually. It was oddly comforting to witness a fully-developed ritual that affirmed the same instincts I've felt, and acted upon to the best of my ability, when caring for the bodies of loved ones immediately following their deaths. Islam and Judaism contain specific instructions for the treatment of the dead, but in western Christianity, with our great discomfort with death and, especially with corpses, we have nearly forgotten the tender responsibility once carried by family members, and as a result we've relinquished a big part of what these immediate hours have to teach us. Trying to reclaim that myself, and confronting and overcoming my own fears and discomfort, has been a profound inner journey in my own life.

This was a remarkable film on so many levels: about relationships, culture, life and death, and especially, perhaps, about what art is at its core. Only one sequence in the middle of the film-- al fresco cello playing and wild goose flight, with a snow-capped mountain background -- felt over-long, and ill-advised. "Okuribito" ranks as one of the best films I've ever seen, and also did what movies do best, opening a world of specific human experience and emotion that flows between the characters and the audience, enlarging life itself.

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Yesterday we also saw a good documentary, "Tracing Aleida," about a young Mexican woman's search for her brother; the family was separated after the parents were "disappeared," and an absolutely dismal high-budget Egyptian film, "Baby Doll Night;" I can't imagine how or why it was accepted into the contest here unless the sponsorship of the Egyptian government (the ambassador to Canada was in attendance last night) somehow influenced the choice. Billed as a film "about the dream of peace between all people," the film actually insulted every group it touched: Americans, Israelis, Jews and Arabs themselves, who were often presented as embarrassing caricatures. But it was also simply a terrible piece of movie-making that dragged on, lurching from one situation to another, for nearly three hours. It was the exact opposite of the Japanese film in being totally inept at balancing humor and suffering. We should have walked out - and that's the assessment of someone who generally likes Middle Eastern movies.